Earlier this year, Anil Dash wrote about "the web we lost." In the mid-2000s, it was fashionable (and expected) for social networks and web services to make their data available to users and other services in a machine-readable form. Blogger could use your Flickr photos, for example, even though Google owned one service and Yahoo owned the other.

That kind of access to data has been tightened recently: Instagram doesn't allow the huge use of its database that Flickr does; Twitter no longer even offers RSS feeds of its users's feeds. But some data is still being given away, by companies motivated either by their bottom line or, as in IFTTT, by usefulness.

A postscript: Now, the New York Times offers a swath of RSS feeds, and those can all be triggered through the IFTTT's RSS channel regardless.